Angelina Jolie interview: here comes trouble

Two years after giving birth to twins, Angelina Jolie is back in an
action-packed thriller. 'This one’s for my daughters’, she says.

Angelina Jolie has heard it all before: she is suffering from depression; she and Brad Pitt are breaking up; she has decided never to act again… the rumours persist and she just laughs.

The latest report to hit the internet and magazines around the world states authoritatively that she is retiring from the screen and may have made her last movie.

Nothing could be further from the truth, she says when I meet her in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in the Mexican holiday resort of Cancun to discuss her new film, Salt. “Things get reported and blown out of proportion,” she says. “I’ll be working strongly for the next few years, doing the projects I love most and the films that are important to me and then after that I’ll only do a film every once in a while – one that matters,” Jolie says.

“I don’t know what the future has in store and I don’t know what my children are going to demand of me as they get older,” she says, “but I know Brad and I are going to focus on working for the next few years, then after that we’re going to spend a lot of time just travelling with the children and working on other things together.”

As we speak, four of her and Pitt’s six children are playing outside in the swimming pool, watched over by a nanny and three male “minders”. They had all flown in by private jet the day before while Pitt and their two-year-old twins, Knox and Vivienne, remained in Los Angeles, where he is filming Moneyball.

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The action thriller Salt takes its name from Jolie’s CIA agent, a woman running from all kinds of trouble after being labelled a Russian sleeper spy. The James Bond-type role (originally intended for Tom Cruise) calls for her to elude her pursuers by jumping off bridges, hopping across high-rise ledges, leaping from truck to truck and hurling herself out of a helicopter.

It marks the Oscar-winning actress’s return to work after taking a year off and, she says, Pitt was supportive of her decision to take an all-action role, despite the fact she was still recovering from the birth of the twins.

“I wanted to do this movie for my daughters because it’s a good movie for women, and action movies for women are very rarely based in reality,” she says.

“I’ve done films that are focused on action and films that are focused on drama but this is the first time I’ve been able to do both in the same movie. I took Salt’s character and her relationships very seriously and with as much commitment as I would have given to any dramatic film.”

She makes it all look so easy on screen but in reality, she says it was a gruelling slog. “At first I didn’t know if I’d be able to do it. I’d had a C-section with the twins and I was still recovering. It took me a while before I was actually physically able to run again. For the first few days on the set I felt I wasn’t going to make it through but eventually by the end I was in really great shape.”

At the age of 35, Jolie is probably in the best shape she has ever been. Friendly and at ease, she has a natural sex appeal and talks openly about details of home and family life that many stars prefer to keep to themselves.

When she and Brad first started dating, Jolie had already adopted Cambodian baby Maddox, now aged nine, whom Pitt later adopted too. They adopted an Ethiopian daughter, Zahara, five; and Pax, now six; and Angelina gave birth to Shiloh, four, who was born in Namibia, and twins, who were born in Nice, France.

She and Pitt have homes in New York, New Orleans and Los Angeles, but when they are not working they have recently been spending most of their time in Europe, mainly at their 1,000-acre estate in the south of France. Earlier this year, the family went to Venice, where Jolie filmed the romantic drama The Tourist with Johnny Depp and at the same time took the opportunity to show their children another culture and further their education.

“The great gift I’ve been able to give my children is that we’re able to live abroad financially and because of work,” Jolie says. “When we were in Italy the children were learning Italian and learning about the history of Venice and we drove to Florence and showed them the statue of David. When we’re in France they learn the history of France and the French Revolution.

“These countries are so different from America and it’s been good for all of us to have those long French lunches and extended Italian dinners and go for walks together and explore. We tend to be very rushed in America and Europe has a good pace for us.”

The actress, who won an Oscar for Girl, Interrupted and was nominated again in 2009 for Changeling, will take the rest of the year off before starting work on her next film, Serena, a period drama set in America’s Depression-era South. The family, of course, will be going with her.

“My family is both my strength and my weakness,” Jolie says.

“I love them deeply and if anything happened to them it would break me. I could have the worst day in the world with people saying the most horrible things about me but I go home and my kids love me and I feel like the most important person in the world.”